Chapter of the Year 2011 – IEEE SPS Malaysia Chapter

The IEEE Signal Processing Society Malaysia Section was awarded the IEEE Signal Processing Society Chapter of the Year 2011 award in 2012. Its Chair, Mohammad Faizal Ahmad Fauzi, received the award on behalf of the chapter at ICASSP 2012 in Kyoto, Japan. This achievement was in recognition of the many activities successfully carried out by IEEE SPS Malaysia Section, including international conferences, free workshops, technical visits, social programmes, membership drives and administrative duties. Established in the year 2002, the chapter has been growing in strength and membership stands at 100 as at December 2012.

Conferences and Workshops
The chapter started its flagship conference, the IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (ICSIPA) in 2009. This bienniaI conference were major successes in 2009 and 2011, attracting over 50% and 70% international participation, respectively. This year, IEEE ICSIPA 2013 will be held on October 8-10, 2013 in the Historical City of Melaka (Malacca), a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Malaysia. Calls for Papers have been distributed and the dedicated organizing committee members led by the General Chair, Rajasvaran Logeswaran, are working tirelessly towards making it a greater success than its predecessors.

One of the most successful education programs organized by the chapter since 2010, is the Image Processing, Image Analysis and Real-Time Imaging (IPIARTI) symposium. The annual chapter-sponsored event is open free of charge to all IEEE members and non-members with the aim of bringing the university and industry communities together to share and discuss the latest trends and technology in the image processing and computer vision fields. This event also aims to promote IEEE Signal Processing Society to the participants. The 1-day symposium comprises of several keynote presentations, with at least one being a Distinguished Lecturer Program (DLP) talk and several other general presentations in a conference style setting. The most recent was held on August 30, 2012 at Universiti Teknologi Mara, Shah Alam, Malaysia. 80 participants attended the symposium that was successfully organized by a team led by Nor’aini Abdul Jalil. The keynotes were given by DLP speaker Nasir D. Memon and Jussi Parkkinen. This year, the symposium will be held at Universiti Tenaga Nasional, Putrajaya Campus, Malaysia during the first week of May 2013 by a team led by Syed Khaleel Ahmed and Yasmin Hanum Md Thayoob. In addition, a Symposium on Acoustic, Speech and Signal Processing (SASSP) would be organized concurrently, to benefit a larger group of researchers in fields not directly covered by IPIARTI.

To facilitate more fundamental training in various aspects related to signal processing, the chapter regularly organizes hands-on workshops annually. These include such topics as "Signal Processing with MATLAB," "Image Processing with MATLAB" and "Real-time Video Processing". Short course such as those on “Data Compression Strategies”, and technical talks at various institutions are also conducted. All these help to meet the signal processing training needs of students, academia, and the industry. The chapter also arranges technical visits to research labs across the country as well as Singapore.

Challenges and Opportunities
The chapter, having consolidated its position in Malaysia, in particular, and Asia, in general, is now setting its sights on bringing flagship conferences to Malaysia. To this end, the executive committee has been working closely with the Malaysian Conferences and Exhibition Bureau (MyCEB). A team comprising of two executive committee members (M. Iqbal Saripan and Rajasvaran Logeswaran) presented a bid for MMSP 2014 at the MMSP 2012 that was held at Banff, Canada. The chapter is also planning to submit a bid to host ICASSP 2018.

The chapter is eagerly spreading its wings both in terms of activities as well as in terms of geographical involvement. There is much to be achieved and the coming years are expected to see many more successful activities and collaborations by the chapter.